The machine tools allegedly sold by the Italian firm, Olivetti, to a Soviet aeronautics factory where they were used to build the YAK 41 fighter-bomber.
The machine-tools industry is probably not something that crosses your mind every day.
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With the rapid industrialization that has occurred in China, it is no surprise that China is now the largest market for machine tools in the world.
Ironically, as the debate intensifies over the appropriate controls on the export of machine tools, fresh evidence has just become public concerning the direct military use being made by the USSR of accurate systems illegally acquired from the Italian firm, Olivetti.
Under these circumstances, there may be an alternative to selling the East Europeans state-of-the-art machine tools whose potential for militarily significant abuse is considerable, while at the same time encouraging the necessary retooling of the American industrial base.
It found that 80 percent of the five-axis machine tools they sold in the United States between 2005 and 2008 were imported, with Japanese and German machines making up the majority of models.
U.S. producers of some of the most technologically advanced machine tools are in trouble, according to an assessment by the Department of Commerce.
Since then, the China market for machine tools has grown at approximately 20 percent annually, while the markets in Germany and most industrial economies have been flat to declining.
The Germans and other allies wish to sell the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations machine tools with the capability of producing, for example, advanced aviation components with an accuracy of plus-or-minus five microns (two ten-thousandths of an inch) or better.
In 1988, after the Toshiba Machine Company transferred such tools to the USSR enabling the Soviet navy to fabricate vastly improved submarine propellers, Congress enacted legislation that would both prohibit imports into the United States of products manufactured by companies violating COCOM rules and bar such firms from awards of U.S. government contracts.
Unfortunately, there is considerable evidence that Olivetti is not the only Western manufacturer of machine tools to have transferred strategically significant equipment to the Soviet bloc.
With the right monetary, fiscal and regulatory tools, the growth machine will eventually whirr into life.
Toshiba illegally exported to the Soviet Union sophisticated machine tools needed to manufacture advanced submarine propellers.
Germany, which supplied China with the high-precision machine tools needed to support its growth, saw its exports boom.
The remaining producers of machine tools have either shifted production to other machine tool lines, or have moved production offshore.
In judging the appropriate standard, however, the relevant test should not be the state of the art of Western machine tools and like technologies.
The best known of such incidents was that involving the sale by Toshiba and Kongsberg of advanced machine tools and enabling software to the USSR for the purpose of producing extremely quiet submarine propellers.
Companies making five-axis machine tools in the United States take a lot longer to build them than foreign rivals.
In a still-unfolding investigation, Machines Francaises Lourdes (MLF) of France (formerly Forest-Line) evidently transferred highly sophisticated machine tools to the USSR.
It is to be expected, however, that Washington will be urged to trade a relaxation of the export control standard on machine tools for promises of greater allied efforts on enforcement.
Even more fundamentally, the digital economy's infrastructure has advanced basic material science and classes of machine tools that have led directly to the new high-power electronics (enabling hybrids) and to big, cheap flat-panel, thin-film PVs (derived from the massive thin-film machines that make flat-panel-TVs).
What the rest of the world sees as squirrel chow Von Ehr sees as a perfect woodmaking machine, with the necessary energy supply, tools and complete instructions wrapped in a small package.
The Bureau of Industry and Security is in charge of licensing the sale of five-axis machine tools for export.
Founded in 1954 by the son of a traveling X-ray machine installer, the Glenwood, Ill. company makes tools called dosimeters, which measure and monitor radiation exposure.
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Key technologies transferred by or through Germany to the Soviet Union include: high accuracy machine tools, deep underground tunneling machines, telecommunications equipment, underwater sensors, sophisticated computers and manufacturing equipment associated with microelectronics, advanced composites and superalloys.
Plugging the proposals into a spreadsheet, he started listing the tools needed to produce each one: A CNC milling machine for an updated, open-source letterpress printer, a laser cutter for a sensor warning pilots of nearby planes.
The United States exported 515 five-axis machine tools between 2005-2007, and only 12 of these went to China.
The town has a strong manufacturing tradition, particularly in machine tools and electrical goods.
Even in making machine-tools, it defers only to the United States, Japan and Germany, and engineering graduates from Turin and Milan are world-class.
Japan's factories play a significant role in global production, churning out a fifth of the world's semiconductors and large shares of advanced machine tools and solar panels.
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